Quotes About Parenting

And the child who was happy with herself meant the parents had won the jackpot.

A child just wants to love her parents and to be loved, and it seems like it should be simple to do that, but sometimes it's not.

Parents should be completely dull and ordinary and predictable. You want their relationship to be stable and incredibly boring, as though you would kill yourself if you had to be in that marriage." Neither

When you have a child, it's like right away there's this grandiose fantasy about who he'll become. And then time goes on and a funnel appears. And the child get pushed through that funnel, and shaped by it, and narrowed a little bit.

Susannah was lonely; I knew that about her, could see it among all the other small trophies of unhappiness that she lined up on triumphant display for me, the way children often do, providing an entire museum of disappointments and inviting the parents in, as if to say: You see? You see how you fucked me up and what it led to? It led to this!

Sometimes it felt like parenting amounted to a series of questionable decisions, one after another.

When you realize, you have no idea what's going on in your kid's head? One morning, you wake up and there's this alien in your house. They look like your kid, sound a little like them, but they are not your kid. They're something else that you don't know.

Mother gave a flick of a glance at the fork in Tori's hand. "Children without manners are a wound in a mother's side.

Even with men doing more parenting than before, the majority of women are still left facing the well-rehearsed motherhood-versus-career dichotomy. But it's not a dichotomy; its a socially organized choice masquerading as a natural one.

Teach your sweet child to leave the beautiful flowers in the soil.

Parents are key when it comes to keeping kids off drugs. Good parenting is the best anti-drug we have.

The secret of dealing successfully with a child is not to be its parent.

There comes a time in every mother's life when it becomes very clear that your child is a much better person than you are, but you're not allowed to say this because then where would you go from there—admitting such a thing to a nine-year-old?

It's too late. Seventeen-year-olds don't need fathers. Oh god. I'm thirty-four years old and I need a father. I can't even begin to think what my daughter needs.

I hope you're not smoking in front of her,' Lucia says to him. 'Yeah, I lie in bed and puff in her face, Lucia,' he says, irritated.

Toto sits up, holding tight to the bar and staring out at the world. He drops a new toy that came with the pram and starts crying. Jimmy picks it up and crouches, looking into his caramel eyes. 'I'm Jimmy,' he whispers, 'and you're the first thing I've ever sort of owned and I don't want to get this wrong.

That's universal — we all want to bring every good thing to our children. But what's not universal is our ability to provide every good thing.

W]hen I told my dad why I was calling, he just said, 'Honey, you're so beautiful it doesn't matter what you wear.' I wondered how many dads in America were, at that very moment, giving their daughters the same useless advice mine was giving me.

I do not understand what makes mothers think they are walking-talking thermometers.But I think somewhere during the process of giving birth and changing diapers, they actually begin to belive they have this supernatural sense.

When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.

Read-aloud sessions are times when parents and children fall in love with each other. (Reading Magic)

This is the thing about being a parent," she said. "Do a good job, and your kids feel like they can take on the entire world, and sometimes that involves a world that's not anywhere near you. Do a lousy job, and they cling to your skirt and suck their thumbs—which is not so attractive in an adult person—but you do get to see them. Like all the time. You've got to let go, Annie." "I've

You got kids who act loony and take drugs left and right. They pretend they hate their parents who gave them everything in the world. These kids grow up, and their kids stick earrings in private places and get tattoos all over their bodies and don't know whether to act like boys or girls. They think they love everybody. The truth is they love nobody, including themselves.

There's no road map on how to raise a family: it's always an enormous negotiation.